Section 19 of 74 - Table of Contents
Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:
--And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of WILHELM MEISTER. A
great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against
a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.
He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step
backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.
A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a
noiseless beck.
--Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful
ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always
feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.
Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door
he gave his large ear all to the attendant's words: heard them: and was
gone.
Two left.
--Monsieur de la Palice, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes
before his death.
--Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with
elder's gall, to write PARADISE LOST at your dictation? THE SORROWS OF
SATAN he calls it.
Smile. Smile Cranly's smile.
FIRST HE TICKLED HER
THEN HE PATTED HER
THEN HE PASSED THE FEMALE CATHETER.
FOR HE WAS A MEDICAL
JOLLY OLD MEDI ...
--I feel you would need one more for HAMLET. Seven is dear to the mystic
mind. The shining seven W.B. calls them.
Glittereyed his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought the
face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed low:
a sizar's laugh of Trinity: unanswered.
ORCHESTRAL SATAN, WEEPING MANY A ROOD
TEARS SUCH AS ANGELS WEEP.
ED EGLI AVEA DEL CUL FATTO TROMBETTA.
He holds my follies hostage.
Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. Gaptoothed
Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house. And
one more to hail him: AVE, RABBI: the Tinahely twelve. In the shadow of
the glen he cooees for them. My soul's youth I gave him, night by night.
God speed. Good hunting.
Mulligan has my telegram.
Folly. Persist.
--Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a
figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though
I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
--All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his
shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.
Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to
us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work
of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave
Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words
of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's
world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for
schoolboys.
A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike
me!
--The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely.
Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy.
--And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One
can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.
He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.
Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the heavenly
man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in
us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon the altar. I
am the sacrificial butter.
Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name
Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no
secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to
see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light,
born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of
buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P. must work off
bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very illustrious
sister H.P.B.'s elemental.
O, fie! Out on't! PFUITEUFEL! You naughtn't to look, missus, so you
naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.
Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace
a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.
--That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about
the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and
undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's.
John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:
--Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle
with Plato.
--Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his
commonwealth?
Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.
Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very
peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces
smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after Blake's
buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow.
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.
--Haines is gone, he said.
--Is he?
--I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't
you know, about Hyde's LOVESONGS OF CONNACHT. I couldn't bring him in to
hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.
BOUND THEE FORTH, MY BOOKLET, QUICK
TO GREET THE CALLOUS PUBLIC.
WRIT, I WEEN, 'TWAS NOT MY WISH
IN LEAN UNLOVELY ENGLISH.
--The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.
We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green
twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.
--People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of
Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the
world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the
hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living
mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the
sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower
of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the
poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.
From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.
--Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose
poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about HAMLET.
He says: IL SE PROMENE, LISANT AU LIVRE DE LUI-MEME, don't you know,
READING THE BOOK OF HIMSELF. He describes HAMLET given in a French town,
don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.
His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.
HAMLET
OU
LE DISTRAIT
PIECE DE SHAKESPEARE
He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown:
--PIECE DE SHAKESPEARE, don't you know. It's so French. The French point
of view. HAMLET OU ...
--The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.
John Eglinton laughed.
--Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but
distressingly shortsighted in some matters.
Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.
--A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for
nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting
in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one. Our Father
who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot. The
bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration
camp sung by Mr Swinburne.
Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.
WHELPS AND DAMS OF MURDEROUS FOES WHOM NONE
BUT WE HAD SPARED ...
Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.
--He will have it that HAMLET is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for Mr
Best's behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh
creep.
LIST! LIST! O LIST!
My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.
IF THOU DIDST EVER ...
--What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded
into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of
manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris
lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from LIMBO PATRUM, returning to
the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?
John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.
Lifted.
--It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a
swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the
bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.
Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the
groundlings.
Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.
--Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks by
the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the pen
chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon has
other thoughts.
Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!
--The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the
castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the
ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who
has studied HAMLET all the years of his life which were not vanity in
order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage,
the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth,
calling him by a name:
HAMLET, I AM THY FATHER'S SPIRIT,
bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,
young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died
in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.
Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in
the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words
to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been
prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that
he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you
are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the
guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
--But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began
impatiently.
Art thou there, truepenny?
--Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I mean
when we read the poetry of KING LEAR what is it to us how the poet lived?
As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l'Isle has
said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet's
drinking, the poet's debts. We have KING LEAR: and it is immortal.
Mr Best's face, appealed to, agreed.
FLOW OVER THEM WITH YOUR WAVES AND WITH YOUR WATERS, MANANAAN,
MANANAAN MACLIR ...
How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?
Marry, I wanted it.
Take thou this noble.
Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's
daughter. Agenbite of inwit.
Do you intend to pay it back?
O, yes.
When? Now?
Well ... No.
When, then?
I paid my way. I paid my way.
Steady on. He's from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe
it.
Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got
pound.
Buzz. Buzz.
But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under
everchanging forms.
I that sinned and prayed and fasted.
A child Conmee saved from pandies.
I, I and I. I.
A.E.I.O.U.
--Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries?
John Eglinton's carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid for
ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.
--She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She
saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore
his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed
when he lay on his deathbed.
Mother's deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. Who brought me into this
world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. LILIATA
RUTILANTIUM.
I wept alone.
John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.
--The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got
out of it as quickly and as best he could.
--Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His
errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian,
softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.
--A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of
discovery, one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates learn
from Xanthippe?
--Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts
into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (ABSIT NOMEN!),
Socratididion's Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever know. But
neither the midwife's lore nor the caudlelectures saved him from the
archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.
--But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best's quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem
to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.
His look went from brooder's beard to carper's skull, to remind, to chide
them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless though
maligned.
--He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory.
He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling
THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME. If the earthquake did not time it we should
know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds, the
studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, VENUS AND ADONIS, lay
in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London. Is Katharine the
shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and beautiful. Do you think
the writer of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, a passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in
the back of his head that he chose the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire
to lie withal? Good: he left her and gained the world of men. But his
boywomen are the women of a boy. Their life, thought, speech are lent
them by males. He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others
have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the
comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over
the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is
a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger
than herself.
And my turn? When?
Come!
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A Little Princess Sections: 24 What's this? Table of Contents |
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